Teaching Metaphor Revisited

After having taught a full unit this semester, I believe that my orignal teaching metaphor still stands. While I was teaching my unit, I did feel like a conductor of a band at many times. I had to organize all of my lessons just like a conductor plans rehersals. I had to think about what my students already knew and base my teaching on their prior knowledge base. Just as a band needs new pieces to work on that challenge their existing skill level, so to does a class of students need new material to work with and learn that challenges their existing knowledge. However, a band cannot be given a piece that is too complicated for its members to play. If this happens, the band will not grow and develop new skills. Instead, the band members will become frustrated with failure. In the same way, I had to make sure that I was targeting my students at their instructional level and not giving them material that was too difficult. Sometimes it was hard to find this delicate balance.

My class was also composed of many different students with different skills, backgrounds, and interests. Just as a band must learn how to play euphonious music with all of its various instruments, so too did I have to learn how to teach a group of very different students so that they all learned and benefitted from my instruction. Although this process was not easy and took a lot of effort, it was definitely worth it. Just as a conductor smiles and bows proudly after his band has played a piece successfully, so too did I smile and bow in my own head after a successful lesson.

Summative Assessment

Our summative assessment consisted of multiple choice and short answer questions. We constructed our assessment in this way partly because our teacher said that she usually uses multiple choice questions and likes to include questions from past SOL tests, and partly because we wanted our students to be able to show us what they knew rather than just recognizing what they knew in a multiple choice question.

At the end of our fifth lesson, we gave our students a review worksheet that had all of the questions we asked them during the review game and an answer key to help them study for their test. We thought this would be beneficial to our students because scheduling conflicts made it so that they would not be able to take our test until almost a week after we had finished teaching the unit. We also wanted to give them a worksheet with information on it since they did not have a textbook or any other papers to look at to study. It seems a little weird to me that they do not take notes or have a book to highlight. I know I did not know how to take notes in third grade either, but now that I have been taking notes for years, I do not remember what it was like to learn, or study for a test without them. I did have a textbook in third grade to study from though. I think that getting away from textbooks is a great idea and can often make learning a lot more interesting and in depth, but I am not sure what students use to study then. Do teachers give them other information in worksheets? Or do they just remember things a lot more easily at that age?

Our students did really well on our summative assessment. Almost everyone in the class got all of the answers right and those that did not only missed one or two questions. I was really happy to see this. It made me feel good to know that our students actually did learn what we wanted them to learn and that they were able to retain the information. The only question I am left with is: does this mean we did a really good job of teaching and that our students really understood the concepts, or could it possibly mean that our test was too easy and we should have made more complex questions?

Although teaching this unit took a lot of time and effort, I really enjoyed teaching it. It makes me feel good to know that I can teach an entire unit and that my students will learn. I feel a lot more confident in my teaching abilities now!

Fifth Lesson

Alison and I taught our fifth and last lesson together. It was nice to be able to work together again and I really was not nervous at all going into this lesson, even though this was when we were being observed, because I had already taught two lessons successfully on my own. I think teaching by myself gave me more confidence in my teaching abilities.

This lesson went really well and our timing worked out nicely so that we had enough time to do everything we had planned. This lesson was on recycling and conservation as well as a review for the test. We started out by having our students recall things we had talked about previously in the unit because we could not teach this last lesson until almost a week after we had taught our previous lessons. I was pleasantly surprised by how much they remembered. They touched on things from each of our previous lessons which made me feel more comfortable about how much they had learned. Then we went through a PowerPoint presentation on things regarding recycling and conservation. We went through this quickly because, based on our preassessment and by observing our students during the previous lessons, they seemed to have a pretty good grasp on these concepts already.

After the PowerPoint we had the students participate in a trash bag sort. We explained the directions to them and then split them into groups. However, when we told each group to move to a certain location, confusion ensued and half of our students did not seem to know which group they were in. I think this was partly caused by the fact that we counted them off 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. and this was probably a more confusing way to divide them. When I had to divide the students into groups to do the experiments in lesson two, I just divided them by where they were sitting and this worked well. However, Alison said that she used the counting off method in one of her previous lessons and it worked just fine so I do not know what happened there. I did learn though that no matter what system you use to break students into groups, you must be sure to be clear and to repeat instructions so that they know what they are supposed to do. Once we had cleared up the confusion about who was in which group, the trash bag sort went well. Each group seemed to have some really good conversations about what could be recycled or not. We did run into some problems when we were going over the sort though because there were a few items that even Alison and I were not sure of and some of the items were difficult to explain. I realized that knowing something and knowing something well enough to teach it are two very different things. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would make sure I knew exactly what could be recycled or not and why and how to explain it to my students.

After the trash bag sort, we played a Jeopardy-style game to help our students review for their unit test. I was very happy with how the review game went because all of our students seemed to know the answers to just about all of the questions. Not only did they know the answers, but they could also explain their reasoning and why one answer was correct and not another. The only problem we had with this part of the lesson was that we could not decide how students should answer the questions. We did not want it to be just whoever raised their hand first answered the question because then it would have been two or three students answering all of the questions. We decided that we would have each student take a turn, one student on one team and then one student on the other team to answer questions back and forth so that everyone got a chance to answer a question. This worked well and I was impressed by how good our students were at being quiet and waiting for their turn. However, there were problems with this method and we lost some students' attention because they knew their turn was not coming up soon so they did not really need to pay attention. If I could reteach this lesson, I would come up with a better method of playing the game so that even though one student at a time was getting to answer a question, the other students would still be involved and need to be paying attention.

Overall, I think our lesson went well and we accomplished what we wanted to get done.

Third and Fourth Lessons

Since Alison taught these lessons, I do not have too much to say about them. When we were planning them, lesson four, which was about how plants and animals interact, seemed like it would be more fun because we planned a food chain scenario activity for our students to do. We could not think of anything too exciting for our students to do during lesson three that would correlate well to our objectives for the lesson. Lesson three was about how humans affect the environment and we decided they could do a journal prompt writing response for this lesson. I think these two lessons represent a good use of backward design. We could have found a really cool and fun activity for our students to do for lesson three, but it probably would not have been in alignment with out instructional goals and objectives. This is why we chose to do the journal prompt instead. It still gave the students something interesting to do, and it also required them to use critical thinking skills to show that they really understood the lesson.

After talking to Alison about the lessons, they seemed to go well. She said the journal prompt question for lesson three was a little vague and probably could have elicited better responses from our students if it had been more specific. She said that our students definitely seemed to understand the lesson though. Lesson four went really well. Since our students had already learned about food chains, this lesson built on nicely to what they already knew and helped them think about food chains in new ways. She said they did a really good job on the food chain scenario activity, and came up with some interesting and creative ideas with the information they were given.

Second Lesson

The second lesson for our unit went really well. I felt much more comfortable going in to teach this lesson because I had already taught one lesson by myself and I also knew the students and their names better.

This lesson was about the effects of natural events on species. I began the lesson by briefly reviewing what we did in the first lesson. Then I moved into a PowerPoint presentation which included before and after pictures of a flood, a fire, erosion, and disease. I asked the students to describe the before picture for each event, the after pictures, and then what would have happened to plants and animals living in each habitat. I was surprised by the quality of discussion the students had about these pictures. They gave very detailed and observant descriptions of the pictures and had great ideas about what would have happened to the species that could have lived in each picture. All of the students seemed very engaged and lots of students had comments to add to the discussion. I think this activity really helped them to understand just how powerfully natural events can effect species. The erosion pictures were particularly helpful because many of the students did not know what erosion was going into this lesson. The pictures gave a great visual image for what erosion can cause.

After this the students participated in experiments that represented different types of erosion. I split the students into three groups of six and there were three different experiments. Since the experiments were not difficult and one of them was not very interesting, I planned on having each group go to each station so that they could do all of the experiments. However, the experiments took longer than I expected and we only had time to do two rotations. This part of the lesson was somewhat difficult because I was instructing students with the most difficult experiment while the other two groups were essentially on their own doing the other two experiments. The other two experiments were very simple and even though I explained these experiments to the whole class before I split them up into groups, I had direction cards ready for the two experiments I would not really be supervising to make sure that the students knew what to do. This was fine, except that some minor incidents regarding who got to do what still arose and it was hard for me to manage since I was trying to help the third group of students with the more complicated experiment. I should have used some more behavior management strategies during this part of the lesson, but honestly, it kind of slipped my mind at the time and it was a little challenging to get the students' attention after each experiment rotation.

After cleaning up the experiments, we discussed as a class how each experiment represented erosion. As a formative assessment and to bring closure to the lesson, I had the students fill out their cause and effect worksheets that they had started in the first lesson based on what they had learned during the second lesson.

Overall, I think this lesson went very well. The timing and pacing were right on target. The students were engaged and excited and after looking over their cause and effect worksheets, they seemed to grasp the concepts from the lesson.

Unit Planning

I think our unit planning went very well. Since we had already planned on teaching our unit right after spring break, Alison and I were able to work on it a lot over spring break, both together and independently. We had everything done before we started teaching our unit at all except for our last lesson and to type out our final draft of our summative assessment. Since our schedules and the schedule of our class conflict a lot, we worked it out so that we would both teach two lessons independently and the last lesson together. I taught the first and second lessons while Alison taught the third and fourth lessons. Although we would have liked to be able to teach together, or at least to be able to observe each other's lessons, we decided that it would be best to split things up this way for the benefit of our students. We did not think it would make a lot of sense to have to carry the unit over three weeks just so that we could both be in the classroom at the same time. I was also excited, though a bit nervous too, about teaching a lesson on my own because I had never done that before. I thought now was a perfect opportunity to get some practice with this since we would still have our classroom teacher to give us feedback on our teaching.

Even though we taught separately, we planned the general outline of our unit and all of the activities and assessments we would do during our unit together. This was a good thing to do so that we were both on the same page with the unit as a whole and knew what each other was going to cover. We both created the lesson plans for the lessons we taught individually by oursevles regarding the specific content covered and details of how the lesson was going to run. We still shared all of our materials for our lessons though so that we could both see what was going to be covered in each lesson. We created the last lesson together since we team-taught it. We also did not create this lesson plan until the other four lessons were already taught so that we could see how everything went in the unit beforehand. That way, if we needed to reteach something, we would have time in our last lesson to do so. I think this was a good idea, especially because we had a whole week between the fourth lesson and the last lesson in which to create the final lesson plan. It was beneficial for us to be able make sure we covered everything we wanted to.

First Lesson

Yesterday I taught the first lesson for our unit. Although I was a little bit nervous before teaching because this is the first lesson I have taught by myself and without my partner even being there at all, I felt prepared for the lesson. Our regular classroom teacher was absent, but she had already emailed me the day before saying that she was sick and might not be there, but that the substitute would know I was coming so this did not bother me. The substitute is going to be taking over for our teacher when she has her baby in a few weeks so she knew the students fairly well already and had a good handle on behavior management, one area I was a bit worried about with having a substitute teacher in the classroom. I came with plenty of time to set up for my lesson and make sure everything was working. Luckily, I brought my PowerPoint presentation on a disk because the internet did not seem to be working.

When the students first came in, the substitute introduced them all to me because she wanted to practice their names as well. I was going to do this as part of my lesson anyway so this worked out well. It is a little disappointing not to be teaching all of the students from our regular class, but by the end of this first lesson I think I knew almost all of their names already. I started the lesson by explaining that my partner and I were going to be teaching them a unit in the next two weeks and that there would be a test at the end. Then I went into an introduction to what we would be learning during the unit with a PowerPoint presentation. This went well. When preparing for the lesson, I decided that the students probably did not know what an organism is. This word is important for our unit and is used in the title so I wanted to make sure students knew what it was. As I predicted, they did not have a clear idea of the word's meaning so I gave them an easy definition of "a living thing" and was glad I had gone over this.

After this introduction to the unit, I told them that we were going to be reading an article on polar bears. I asked them what they knew about polar bears to access their prior knowledge before reading the article. I was surprised by their responses of things like "global warming is killing all of the polar bears." I did not expect this level of response which threw me off a little because the article was about just that topic and most of the students appeared already to know this information. I think they still enjoyed the article though and hopefully it added new information to what they already knew, or served to reinforce their prior knowledge. After the article, I gave them some information on the Endangered Species Act and examples of endangered species to help them better understand the article. I had also planned to go over the difference between threatened and endangered species, but when I asked them about this, they already knew the difference without any prompting from me. Then we discussed their thoughts on the article. The class participated very well in the discussion and it was apparent that they had understood the main ideas of the article. They also seemed quite interested in the topic.

Then I passed out a cause and effect worksheet to each student. I explained that we were going to be using these worksheets throughout the unit. I instructed them to label some boxes with particular titles and then to think about a cause and effect we read about in the article. They understood this concept and were easily able to come up with global warming as a cause and polar bears becoming endangered as an effect. Then we discussed whether global warming would be a natural event or human influence. This was a more contradictory topic for the students and I got conflicting answers. However, they did come to decide on labeling it as a human influence because it is caused by pollution which people create.

The final activity of this lesson was to review what we were going to be learning about during the unit and then to have each student write down one question they had about anything we were going to be teaching during the unit. Some students complained that they could not think of a question, but others came up with more than one. This was the end of my lesson, however we still had about 8 minutes left of the class period. I had prepared another article for students to read in case we had extra time, but I did not think we would have had enough time to read a second article and then discuss it. Instead, I had them choose a book to look at for the rest of the period from a bin of books that Alison had brought in last week on our unit. While they were looking at their books, I asked if anyone found anything interesting that they wanted to share with the class. I got several responses from students which showed that they were interested in the topic and what they were reading about. Some of the students were really excited about this, but a few others were not and I could tell they were looking at books unrelated to our unit.

Overall, I think the lesson went very well. I feel a bit unsure of how I handled the awkward amount of time left at the end of the class. Maybe I should have had them start reading the second article instead? After looking at their cause and effect worksheets, I also think I should have modeled more clearly how they were to label these because about four or five students out of 16 labeled them incorrectly. I think I will review this again more clearly in the second lesson because these worksheets are an integral part of our unit. I also looked at the questions they wrote down about the unit and many of them seemed very interested in global warming.

One final thing I noticed when teaching this lesson was that some students raised their hands constantly to answer questions and contribute to the discussion while others never did. I am not quite sure of how to handle this. I did provide more wait time when only one or two students were raising their hands to give other students a chance to answer and sometimes I called on students who were not raising their hands. However, I do not like putting students on the spot like that.

Field Visit #3

I did not feel very useful during this field visit because we were not able to help our teacher or students with anything. Most of the visit was spent observing the class during their literacy block in which the teacher had reading groups while other students read independently at their desks or used the computer. A parent came in to lead one reading group as well. I think it is great to see parents volunteering in the classroom. Not only does it provide a good example for the students, but also helps the teacher out a lot. One interesting thing I observed during this visit was a lesson on highlighting important words in questions. It did not take very long and it was obvious that the class had done this before. They went through a series of about five questions as a class and each student highlighted the important words in the questions as they went through them on their own papers. Then they went back and answered the questions. This must be part of the preparation for the SOLs. I found it interesting because usually we see teachers focused on content learning for the SOLs, but here I got to see a class practicing test taking strategies as well. Alison and I were also able to look at the students' science books in order to take notes and prepare for our unit.

When the block one science class came in, we gave them our preassessment for our unit since this is the class to which we will be teaching our unit. In some ways it is a little disappointing because although some of the students from our regular class are in this block one class, there are many other students from other third grade classes in block one as well so we do not know all of the students as well as we would like to. The preassessment went well though. All students were able to complete the assessment in about 10-15 minutes. Hopefully it will give us a good indication of where our students stand in regard to our unit.

Field Visit #2

My second field visit to my classroom was even better than the first one. I began this visit by just observing like last time. I watched as the teacher read aloud to the students from Bud, Not Buddy. It was interesting to see how the students responded differently to the book. Some sat intensely focused on the book while others sitting in the back seemed to get distracted by other thoughts once in awhile. They all seemed to enjoy the experience though and peels of laughter could be heard from the whole group in unison at certain points throughout the reading. I made me feel good to see that they were having such a good time and that read alouds can still be as entertaining to children as video games and television. I was also interested to see how the teacher interacted with the students during the read aloud. She stopped to ask them questions sometimes, but not so much that the reading was disfluent. The questions were of various natures including clarifying, summarizing, predicting, and reacting. She also stopped at one point because one student wanted to share a personal story that connected to the book. The teacher let the student tell his whole story, but was then quickly able to refocus the class on the book so that other students did not start wanting to share their own stories as well. I thought it was nice that she allowed this student to share and was not so overly concerned with time and getting a certain amount of reading finished that she had to ignore the student.

During this field visit, I also got to work on word study with two girls in the class. I really enjoyed this because it gave me a chance to interact with two students on a more personal level. They were working on making words plural with es, s, and ies endings. They cut out their list of words and made categories with them. Then I helped them to join some of their categories together and to understand why certain words were grouped together because of the way they are spelled when they are made plural. This helped them to understand the different plural endings. Then they practiced spelling some of the words before I gave them a "test" on all of their words. They used white boards and erasers to write their words. After they had spelled a word, I asked them why they spelled it the way they did. This allowed them to process the different rules in greater depth. I also gave them one word from each category to spell that was not on their word list to see if they could apply what they had learned to new words. They did very well with this task. I was impressed to see how engaged the two girls were with the words. They enjoyed cutting out their words and putting them into categories. They were also eager to spell all of their words for me to prove that they could do it. I was happy to see the amount of effort they put forth during this task. It seemed more like a fun activity and less like work to them.

Field Visit #1 Observing

I really enjoyed my first time back in our classroom since fall semester. It was interesting to see what was new and what had stayed the same regarding our classroom, the students, and even the teacher! The desks are in a new arrangement now as a sort of horseshoe and there are some new things on the bulletin boards. I especially noticed that the science board now has several vocabulary lists for different topics on it that are probably going to be very important for the SOLs. It's nice to see some changes like these that give the room a new and exciting atmosphere. However, I also noticed that one of the bigger bulletin boards has not changed at all since we first started our field placement in the fall. Some of the students looked a little older and taller and some looked the same. It is also possible that there may be a new student in the class because a staff member from the office came in looking for a boy whose name we did not recognize from the fall.

I felt like it was very easy to get back into the groove of our classroom. The kids remembered us and the teacher was very friendly and accommodating. We already knew the students' names and the daily schedule which helped as well. We observed the students during their language arts period in which they participated in reading groups. Many of the students left the room and of those that remained, three worked with the teacher at a kidney-shaped table while another three worked independently at their desks and then they switched places. The students working independently read to themselves, but were also free to move about the classroom and to use the computer. We also observed our teacher's block one science class. This was very helpful to see because we will probably be teaching our unit to this block one science class. They were working on habitats. The teacher split them up into groups of three and gave them a large piece of paper and a few books on a specific habitat. The students were asked to draw a picture of their habitat, using specific animals and plants that they found in the books that actually live in that habitat. It was interesting to observe the dynamics of different groups. In several cases, it appeared that two students were taking charge while another followed the directions of the other two. Some groups seemed to be lagging behind at the beginning. By the time we left though, they all seemed to be working hard on their projects.

I was impressed by how smoothly the day seemed to be running given that they were on a two-hour delay schedule. I think the daily schedule and routines of the classroom helped the students to settle into their work. The teacher seemed very flexible as well. This is important since there are so many interruptions that occur in a classroom throughout the school year. I had a good first experience in our classroom for this semester and I am glad I got to observe both our regular class and this science class on our first time back in the classroom.

My Teaching Metaphor

As I currently see my role as a teacher in the elementary school classroom, the metaphor of leader of a jazz band comes to mind. As the leader of this group, I am responsible for all of the administrative matters with which the group is involved. I will take care of organizing practice times and making sure that these times and locations are agreeable to everyone. During practices, I will act as the facilitator, making sure that we accomplish what I feel needs to be done. If members of the group start to stray from the task at hand, I will refocus their attention and get everyone back on track. I will also act as a motivator, pushing the different members to do their best and put forth effort into becoming the best that they can be. I will make sure that everyone gets a fair share of practice time so that practices can be beneficial not only to each individual member of the band, but also to the group as a whole. One day the drummer might need to work a little harder on his or her solo piece while the bass player does not have as much to concentrate on. However, during the next week, another player may need more focus and attention. As an end result though, everyone will be playing the best that they can which, in turn, will make our group successful.

I will also be responsible for increasing the repertoire of music we can play. I will introduce the members of my band to new music, carefully choosing pieces that I am confident my fellow band members will be able to play, but that will also challenge them to rise to new levels. I will also take their recommendations and desires into account when choosing new pieces. Our strengths and weaknesses as a band will help in determining what we choose to learn next. As the leader, I will also be responsible for scheduling concerts. These decisions will be based on multiple factors including when everyone is available to play and when I feel that our group is ready to show off what we have been learning. When I am confident that every member of the band will play his or her part well, then I will eagerly look for venues where we can proudly show others what we can do. I will be just as excited as the rest of the band when we have great performances because I am a member of the band as well. We are all in it together.

As leader of the band, my fellow band members will look to me for guidance and support. They will respect me for the leadership I bring to the group. I will also respect them and look to them for guidance when making decisions about what will be best for the band. As a result of my role, my band members will be able to become confident, independent players of their instruments. After learning the basic skills they need to be able to play their own instruments and to play as a member of the group, they will be able to play without my assistance. They will be able to take it upon themselves during a song to play solo pieces and just jam together without really following the set piece of music anymore because they will have the tools they need to be able to elaborate and expand upon a basic song without constant help from me.

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